Years ago, I was a contracted private English teacher to a high up Sony executive who had been moved over to a Sony subsidiary and needed to up his English skill level for the new job.
He was a decent, honest man, but more interested in reliving his past contributions to the company than in developing the English skills necessary for his future in the company. This was, in fact, the normal case for people in similar positions.
Anyway, since my Japanese skills were far better than your average contracted private English teacher, we soon developed a friendship. The gentleman was eventually a very useful connection in getting me out of English teaching and into serious corporate work.
One day, he told me he had been deeply involved in the Betamax development. They were smaller, better quality and technologicallty superior to the VHS technology. The Betamax was also on the market first.
While it is true that Sony did make the error of believing the major market for the technology would be people who would record their own television shows rather than a player technology for prerecorded shows, what made the VHS eventually win out was sheer market penetration.
The key reason for this was that Sony had limited prerecorded offerings (software) and refused to get involved in the distribution of pornography. The VHS rival technology did not. As a result of the Betamax loss, Sony bought (and nearly went under financially) Columbia Pictures and became less family friendly.
When Sony took down Toshiba with the Blu-Ray technology over the HD-DVD more recently, they had both the software (Columbia) and the lack of moral restraint against distributing pornography to fight that war to a strategic victory.
When it comes to distributing entertainment media, if you have moral restraints, it will be your undoing. It is quite sad, really. I did not like the prominent display of the 50 shades of gray books in Costco last Saturday.
Sony could have/should have been Apple. They had the Walkman decades before mp3 players existed. Now that Apple has a reputation to protect they are becoming more like Sony and won't distribute seedy material. They probably won't make the transition into the coming consumer robotics "dot com II" boom.